Mayfield Mall

Mayfield Mall was a shopping mall in Mountain View, California, that operated from the 1960s until 1984. It was the first air-conditioned, enclosed shopping mall in Northern California,[1] though since the 1980s it has spent its life as an office complex. In 2013, Google rented the entire 500,000 square feet (46,000 m2) property; it is now known as that company's Building RSL2.[2]

As a mall

Mayfield Mall opened in 1966 and was the first enclosed mall of its type in the region, taking its name from the original town of Mayfield, which was annexed by Palo Alto in 1925.[3]:10 Its original anchor was JCPenney, which closed stores on Castro Street and University Avenue to consolidate into the mall location.[4]

The mall did decent business but closed in the face of newer, larger centers such as Valley Fair Mall and Stanford Mall. The JCPenney store moved to the San Antonio Shopping Center, where it would last until the mid-1990s.[4]

The office era

In 1986, Hewlett-Packard became the mall's only tenant and renovated the structure to serve as offices, adding atriums and high ceilings. Under HP, the building housed the company's American response center and some 1,600 workers.[5] However, in the early 2000s, HP opted to consolidate into other office spaces, leaving the mall vacant.[6] By 2003, the old mall was on the market after a deal to sell to Stanford Hospital failed over zoning issues.[5] The property was bought by Rockwood Capital and Four Corners Properties for $90 million in 2012, after William Lyons Homes, which had hoped to develop a 260-unit housing complex on the site and demolish the mall, went into bankruptcy. Rockwood and Four Corners instead sought to remodel the site and maintain the office use, renaming the complex San Antonio Station.[6]

In September 2013, Google rented the entire mall in the largest lease deal of the year in Silicon Valley.[1] Google is not the only large tech company to buy and renovate a former mall for office use; the headquarters of Rackspace are located at the former Windsor Park Mall near San Antonio, Texas.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Google to Rent Former Mall in Largest Silicon Valley Deal". Bloomberg. 2013-09-11. Retrieved 2015-10-01.
  2. ↑ Newton, Casey (2015-10-01). "We took Google’s self-driving car prototype through an obstacle course at the mall". The Verge. Retrieved 2015-10-04.
  3. ↑ Page and Turnbull (2014-06-02). "2555 Park Boulevard Historical Resource Evaluation". Retrieved 2015-10-13.
  4. 1 2 "Malls of the Past", MVNick, archived 2007
  5. 1 2 Temple, James (2003-10-24). "H-P buildings go on block for $112M". San Francisco Business Times.
  6. 1 2 DeBolt, Daniel (2012-05-04). "Housing at Mayfield mall site dumped for offices". Mountain View Voice. Retrieved 2015-10-01.

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